Looks like I may get the chance to present my session on Getting Software Done with Visual Studio Team System at the Atlanta Code Camp. They say that a listing on the speakers page is no guarantee that I’ll be on the final schedule, but at least I’m on the speakers page now. Go here, select speakers, and scroll waaaaaaaayyyyy down to read the summary.

I just got my confirmation that my presentation on integrating Visual Studio Team System and Visual FoxPro was accepted for the FoxForward conference in Atlanta. I love sharing my enthusiasm about these tools. This is going to be lots of fun!

It is clear to me, that Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha are the true leaders of the Democratic Party. All of the current so-called “leaders” should resign immediately. I admire both these men for speaking their consciences in Washington where everyone else is busy reading poll results.

I’m trying to sort this one out. When the law of the land is inhumane, who’s fault is it? I believe the person that opened the valve on the poison gas at Auschwitz is a culpable as Adolph Hitler for the deaths of innocent people. If a person igonres the humanity of another, it is that individuals fault, not their religion, or any other excuse they offer. At least, that’s what I think this morning.

I’m a bit put out today. I am exposed daily to information that
offends me. It may be news about my government breaking the law to
violate my privacy. It could be the obscene quarterly profits announcement
of a Mega-Corp. These things can annoy and sometimes even anger me.

I’m not immune to being offended when someone criticizes my religion.
The Episcopal Church has received plenty of misleading, inaccurate and just
plain bad press in the last two years. Why does this matter? I
don’t attack someone’s embassy when they offend me. I don’t assume that I
have the one true perspective and anyone that disagrees with my way of seeing
the world should die.

If you are Muslim and offended by these cartoons, I apologize. I don’t
generally seek to insult people. If you are Muslim, and think I should
die for posting them on my personal website, well then you can kiss my White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant ass.

I did it. I allowed myself to be assimilated, and I have no regrets. Maybe it’s because I’m approaching forty. Maybe my values have changed since college, or at least I hope they have. 🙂 Monday, January 9, 2006, after completing a six month stint as a contractor, I started as a full-time employee of a defense contractor. We develop software specifically for the Department of Defense, and we do it very well.

The company is DPRA Incorporated. I work for the Defense Systems Group, or as a co-worker calls it “The Developer’s Paradise.” DSG is run by a Senior VP who is also a software developer. He can discuss with familiarity the ideas of Fredrick Brooks and Tom Demarco. In fact, he told me that everyone has an office with a door because of Tom Demarco’s book Peopleware.

That’s right kids. I have an office with a door! I also work uninterrupted. Other than our weekly team meeting, if I want anyone to know about my progress, I have to find them, and let them know.

This doesn’t mean we are immune to the realities of software development. Last fall I had to meet a deadline, and I assembled my project in a decidedly slap dash manner in order to fulfill the requirements of the contract. What is unique is that after we met the deadline, I had time to refactor my work into a more maintainable form before release.

Besides the creature comforts, my coworkers are smart, talented and professional. This may sound like hyperbole, but I assure you that I work with some of the best people in the industry. Last summer I went to TechEd and got a feel for the best and the brightest. I’ve met the best of the best, and I work with some of them on a daily basis.

It used to be that the three companies I most wanted to work for were (in order of preference): FogCreek, Microsoft & Wintellect, but not anymore. I’m home, and I don’t have any intention of leaving. If you’d like to join me, then keep your eyes open. We hire regularly.

Tonight we held our VS2005 & SQL Server 2005 local launch event. Microsoft provided some copies of the software to raffle off to the user group members, and Jason Bentley and I presented some features from the new products.

Jason showed some awesome new failover capabilities in SQL Server 2005, and I did a presentation on the new Windows Forms controls and deployment features under the heading of “Smart Client”, whatever that means.

We had a good turnout, and everyone seemed interested in the topics being presented. I had a few gaffes in my presentation, but nothing I haven’t seen the professionals do. 😉

The next meeting is two weeks from tonight, and I expect to see a good turnout then as well. It looks like The East Tennessee .NET User’s Group is healthy and growing in 2006!

I spend my days looking at high resolution monitors; 1600×1200 at work
and 1920×1200 at home. 😀 One suggestion I read for using high
resolutions, is to bump up the DPI Setting in display properties from
96 to 120dpi. This seemed like a good idea until I tried it.

All
the title bars become too large and some applications can’t cope with
non-standard dpi settings. I see enough bad formatting on the
web. I don’t need it on my desktop too, so I changed the setting
back. Unfortunately the window captions were still the wrong
size. I fixed this by going to Display Properties ->
Appearance -> Advanced and playing with the title bar settings until
things appeared normal.

This would seem to end this chapter in
my battle with Windows(tm) except that I earn my living using two
Integrated Development Environments: Visual FoxPro and Visual
Studio. Both IDEs make use of sub-windows with half-height
captions. After my DPI Setting experiment, these captions were
twice as tall as they should be with complementary giant, blocky icons.
😛

I have put up with this situation for months, until
today. Today I found my limit in tolerating ugly displays and set
about correcting the issue. Unfortuanately, Google did not
provide me any leads. I find it unlikely that nobody else has had
this problem. Given my state of mind, I perceviered.

I
set about searching the registry for vaious keywords. I
eventually found the WindowMetrics key under Users\.Default. I
exported that key, edited the path, and imported it into the equivalent
key in the CurrentUser node. After a quick logoff/logon to reload
the registry, Bob’s your uncle!

The attached file should serve
to correct this situation for any other users with this
affliciton. Change the extention from .reg.txt to .reg,
double-click, select OK, and you’ll be golden.